World of Warcraft Cataclysm Trailer Teases New Areas

It's beginning to look a lot like World of Warcraft Cataclysm, which officially launches next Tuesday, though it already kind of launched last week. The titular cataclysm wasn't supposed to happen until December 7, but Blizzard quietly rolled out a massive patch last week and snapped Azeroth's spine nearly two weeks early. All that's missing, it seems, are the brand new areas and Goblin and Worgen races.

If you've been playing the game, you've already seen some of what's in the following Blizzard fly-through teasing changes as well as what's on deck for all you level 80s-going-on-85s ready to poke around the maelstrom now sandwiched between the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.

Me, I'm having a blast just leveling an old-school toon. My Night Elf Hunter won't make level 80 by the time the expansion unlocks next week, but so what. I've been puttering in the middle 50s on a high population PVP server that's suddenly boasting nightly login queues in the thousands.

Are players coming back? New ones signing up? Who knows, but with over 12 million paying players going into next week's launch, it's a bigger event than anything on TV, including NBC's The Event, another "hey-the-aliens-were-already-here!" series that's averaged just 6 million viewers this season.